Perhaps no dictator has captured the minds of historians, scholars, and the general public more than Adolf Hitler. Include Allan Hancock College professor Klaus P. Fischer in that group of people fascinated with the infamous man. Having just released his latest book on the fuehrer, Hitler and America, Fischer has participated in a flurry of interviews from media outlets around the world. He recently spoke to the Sun, reflecting on the various contemporary world attitudes about the dictator.
“It’s interesting,” he said. “When we say someone is bad or we want to call them the most evil thing we can think of, we call them a Hitler. No one ever thinks of Stalin, who was just as evil, or Genghis Khan.”
That fascination with Hitler is part of what prompted him to write his first book on the historical figure. Also, Hitler’s dictatorship is tied into the history of Fischer’s home country.
“I wanted to know how a people could give up a country to a man who was relatively a stranger. … He was not a German, he was Austrian, and for a while he was stateless because he renounced his Austrian citizenship,” Fischer said before launching into a string of facts about Hitler, one fascinating tidbit leading to yet another and another.
The German-born Fischer has become a worldwide expert on the subject. He’s published five books, four of them about Hitler. He wrote his most recent book, Hitler and America, because there was so little written about Hitler’s relationship with the United States. The result will no doubt lead to even more fascination with what helped shape the mind of one of the most evil dictators of all time—as many people consider him to be.
Some of the surprising facts Fischer discovered:
• Hitler’s favorite movie was King Kong.
• He liked watching Mickey Mouse cartoons.
• He devoured books about the Wild West, especially those written by Karl May.
• He influenced the creation of the Volkswagen. It was part of his People’s Car project when he became determined that Germany would have skyscrapers as tall as America’s and all its citizens—not just the rich—would drive the best cars.
• He held admiration for the industrial potential of America but despised what was seen as the excess of the country and was jealous of the wide-open spaces Americans enjoyed and the abundant natural resources.
Fischer doesn’t solely provide lists of facts. He uses them as examples to explore Hitler’s love/hate relationship with America and how he underestimated the role the young country could play in his defeat.
Hitler and America is a look at one slice of the man’s mind. Because of Fischer’s studies for his previous books, he said he doubts that some of the more popular conclusions about Hitler are true because of lack of substantial evidence:
• Hitler was prone to fits—Fischer said he was usually very controlled.
• He was homosexual, sexual deviant, had one testicle, and had his private parts bitten by a goat— Fischer said there’s no physical evidence of this.
• He was schizophrenic— Fischer said this was not likely because he was a strong leader until the end.
• He was a sadomasochist—Hitler never killed someone himself and in fact couldn’t stand to watch brutal things.
Much of what is reliably known about Hitler can be deduced from his character traits rather than psychoanalysis, Fischer said. Hitler was a man who could kiss a woman’s hand and turn on the Austrian charm and then speak in brutal terms to his henchmen. He would control people and use people for his own needs, yet he could effectively mimic caring—though underneath that caring was a nothingness, Fischer said.
“I guess you can say this is what it means to be an evil person,” Fischer concluded.
Because the many facets of Hitler’s life were compartmentalized, it makes it hard to analyze his psyche, Fischer explained: “It’s hard to know the mind of someone else. Do we ever know what goes on in the minds of those we know? What they will do?”
Arts Editor Shelly Cone learned something new while working on this story. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 23-30, 2011.